Festivals Part 1: Diwali (दीवाली)

Prelude: Jeff and I are en route to Chennai, where we'll have the winter RA Meet before we head off for a week of vacation with my dad in Nepal. I'm writing up a series of  three posts about the happenings in the past few weeks, before the memories all get muddled by our vacation.

Festivals are a big deal here. I can't count how many times our PAs have excitedly told us about the special puja (worship) that I've never heard of being done that day in honor of a wide variety of purposes, frequently involving fasting (and often fasting being done exclusively by women, wives for husbands and sisters for brothers). However, even in the US I'd heard of Diwali. Wikipedia it for the details, but its effective tagline is that it's the "festival of lights." I was told that it's treated similarly to Christmas, as gifts are often exchanged among friends and family. It's such a significant shopping event that most businesses mark the start of their financial year with Diwali, and the period surrounding it is considered the holiday season, much like Christmas.

In my naïveté, I envisioned the whole city of Patna filled with delicate, twinkling lanterns and tea lights. I imagined me and Jeff leaning out of our balcony in the evening and admiring the peaceful scene, maybe even setting out our own lantern to join in the festivities.

However, one of my colleagues described her experience on Diwali like "being in a war zone," and to be honest, that's not far off the mark. Without a doubt, it would be more accurate to call Diwali the "festival of explosions" because for the whole evening, I don't think 15 seconds passed without some fire cracker or another going off in shockingly close vicinity. Thankfully, I love fireworks, and I thought that the absolute insanity that prevailed on the days leading up to it and intensifying on Diwali itself was 100% fun.

For those of you who have grown up in the US, think back on what the Fourth of July and New Years Eve are like. Most of the people who live in an urban area gather up in some large, central location, mill around for a little while, and then all watch together as a pre-arranged series of fireworks are set off at a designated time and place. Fire engines and ambulances are on alert close by, and the spectators are prevented from coming too close to the "danger zone." The show itself builds gradually, there's a finale, and then everyone cheers and heads home (or to more celebrations elsewhere).

Of course, India is different. It may be that in larger cities, there are coordinated events, but in Patna, it was a complete free-for-all, with each family or group of friends setting off their own private stash from their roofs or in the streets. Late in the evening, Jeff and I climbed up to the roof of our building, which, since Patna has a low skyline, has a great view of the city. Everywhere we looked, the streets and skies were filled with bright patches, the buildings were bedecked with electric lights, and the city positively glowed.

About a week before Diwali, a whole bunch of stalls I'd never seen before started popping up on the streets. It took me a while to figure out that they were selling fireworks, strings of electric lights, little clay bowls to be filled with oil and burned, candles, and a whole bunch of other things that were fire-friendly. At first, I thought the stalls were selling incense, because coming from California, where fireworks are mostly illegal, I never imagined that all of the major thoroughfares of a large city would be filled with vendors selling them.  So the night before Diwali, while we waited for our poll observation forms to be photocopied, I found myself (and a JPAL colleague who did the actual talking) wandering down Boring Road, browsing and negotiating, and ending up with two huge bags full of a wide variety of fireworks.*

A bunch of us Bihar RAs decided to celebrate together, so we went over to one of the RA's apartments for a lovely dinner. Jeff and I then stopped by one of our PA's homes, and in addition to meeting her family, we also met their Coke-drinking parrot, who clambered all over me and was generally hysterical.

We returned to the RA's apartment and gathered up our small arsenal of fireworks, plus a carload of old surveys that needed to be destroyed (what better occasion than a bonfire for Diwali?). Then we wound our way through the streets, dodging groups of primarily young men setting off fireworks in the road, headed in the direction of a ghat (घाट), a small temple on the banks of the Ganga.

The ghat was beautiful - although we could still hear some celebrating, it was much more peaceful than the rest of the city, and we gleefully piled up stacks and stacks of surveys, lit them on fire with sparklers, and then lined up a series of fireworks next to them, setting them off one by one.

The only wrinkle in this plan of ours was that, as you know, Jeff and I are the happy owners of a small puppy. We were astonished that in the days before Diwali, and up until we reached the ghat, Lalu had been doing great - to be honest, I had been startled by the fire crackers much more often than he had. However, with our plans for dinner and the bonfire, we knew we'd be gone from home too long to leave him alone, so we decided to bring him with us for the evening, and about 10 fireworks in, he just lost it. This was probably due in part to the group of drunk young guys who started lobbing small fire crackers at us, laughing hysterically when we jumped and yelped in reaction.

So we had to call it an early night and leave the other RA's to their revelries while we headed home with our exhausted and frightened puppy, who recovered pretty much immediately when he was home in his crate with his toys and treats - thank goodness for dogs' short attention spans!

Despite the bittersweet end, it was definitely memorable; certainly nothing I'd ever experience in the US!

*The guy we bought the fireworks from asked me how my puppy was doing - I often take Lalu with me while I'm running errands, which causes no end of amusement to the vendors here, since there aren't many young American women dragging street dogs around on a leash in Patna.